Rob, from Andrew Robb’s piece in The Australian:

“Serious inroads into emissions will best be achieved from a position of economic strength, with people in jobs and business profitable.”

Well, we’d certainly have the greatest financial wherewithal to implement serious inroads into a largely renewable energy regime in boom times, but…

There is an awful lot of pressure to maintain the status quo when things are ripping along, as opposed to a lot of deep thought on how to change our methodology when things ain’t going so well.

In recessionary times, people feel the need to be more efficient in order to minimise expenses.

In the down times, labour for the implementation of renewable energy industries and industries running on renewable energy is abundant, whereas in boom times labour is in short supply.

When the economy is booming, there is pressure to keep immigration high in order to supply labour. This constant rapid population growth works directly against overall improvements in energy usage and cuts in greenhouse gas emission. In less economically vibrant times, immigration should be reduced greatly.

We can’t wait for the return to a booming economy to seriously act on climate change. The good times of the last decade are over. We are unlikely to see anything that good for a long time.

All in all, I question Andrew Robb’s assertion. I’m inclined to think that the best time to implement wide-ranging changes is NOW…now that we have fallen off the back end of the boom, and are in strong need of modifying our whole economic philosophy.

Ludwig,

What you say makes sense and I suspect it will happen. It also accords with what I've said previously in another thread that Labor are the instigators of change in modern Australian politics, while the Liberals are the capitalisers.

There is no better time to bring in change than in the aftermath of a crisis or bad event (cf the Declaration of Independence). My main interest at this stage is that the Government tempers its reforms so that the ordinary population are not victims of the process of reform itself. It looks from Rudd's target and Paul Kelly's piece at

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24811094-12250,00.html

that Rudd has charted a middle path that does the least amount of damage and that spreads out the pain more equally.

I'm not so sure that the news provided in the link given by Ludwig in the 30th post to this thread is necessarily good. That it is 'something' is beyond question, but exactly what might that be?

In the news item that announced the committment of A$ 500 million of taxpayers money to the Renewable Energy Fund, the statement that really lept out at me was this one:

"The only condition, [Rudd] said in an accompanying statement, was "availability of suitable demonstration projects.""

That, to me, indicates the die is already substantially cast in the government's mind, as to what technologies it intends to subsidise. Existing ones. Technologies that have ALREADY been developed, probably dependent upon intellectual property rights (patents), WITHOUT government funding! How else could they qualify as 'suitable demonstration projects' in the terms of this announcement? And 'suitable' is in itself a word that is as wide as it is long, isn't it!

Now I don't want to rain too heavily upon the Federal government's parade, but it has to be recognised that the beneficiaries of this taxpayer largess will almost certainly be large foreign corporations. Like, for example, Chevron (in oil and geothermal), a corporation that I noted ran an advertisment promoting itself on, I think, Channel 9 recently for reasons, given its heretofore seeming absence from the Australian corporate scene, upon which one can only speculate.

Why then do Australian taxpayers (you, your children, your children's children) have to financially assist such likely behemoths to roll out their EXISTENT capabilities in renewable energy?

Ah, but there's an unresolved problem or two, isn't there! Like the price to be charged. Like the electricity industry throughout Australia not being fully privatised yet. The behemoths, without that pre-condition being achieved, don't hold a mortgage over Australia's future.

Its a downright shame that a hot dry rock prospect in the Hunter region of NSW, virtually co-located with the publicly owned existing coal-fired generating capacity on an existing distribution grid, seems to be tied up going nowhere.